


Don't Look Back (Sabine)

by gondalsqueen



Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Women of Star Wars Week, art therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 14:24:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4709291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gondalsqueen/pseuds/gondalsqueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pencil and watercolor, not the usual bright paint. A small girl with two long, dark ponytails. Untied ribbons. An absurdly frilly pink polka dotted skirt that stood out like a dancer’s. Dirty knees with bacta patches on them. A toy bowcaster. Cycling gloves with the fingers torn out. It had the detail of something drawn from a specific memory, maybe even from an old photograph. She could even read the designer labels on the clothing.</p><p>The Sabine of the picture bent over something, a look of cartoonish concentration on her face. Despite the detail in the picture, she’d left the entire background white.</p><p>Hera laughed, delighted. “Really? This skirt?”</p><p>Sabine played indignant, but she grinned back. “Hey, look at the rest of the outfit, okay? I was clearly a ballerina superhero.”</p><p>“Hmph. You still are.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Look Back (Sabine)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Women of Star Wars Week, Day 1: "Don't look back."

Sabine was clean.

Clad in a trill shirt and shorts, feet bare, she sat at the dejarik table, scribbling furiously, shading something in at the end of a sketch. No trace of the soot and smoke from the day’s mission remained on her. Hera was still a filthy mess, but she couldn’t resist peering over Sabine’s shoulder. “That’s the one from yesterday? What did it turn out to be?” If Sabine had wanted to keep the sketch private, she would have worked in her room, as she often did.

“Zeb wanted me to draw a landscape. Something with trees.”

“So I could hang it up and imagine,” Zeb put in. “I’m sick of all this flatland.”

“Oh, are you taking commissions, now?” This was interesting.

Sabine shrugged, a little embarrassed, a little amused. “Sure. I mean, I guess. I do owe you guys for the food, and the not being dead, and all. And I’m not swamped with a lot of other stuff right now. What did you have in mind? Zeb, the swimsuit edition?”

Zeb chuckled. He treated Sabine like a kitten who had come aboard already trained in endless amusing antics. Look at her chase the string. Look at her sharp little teeth. She is so smart and so funny. Last night he had actually said to Hera, “Can we really keep her?”

Hera smiled at the image. “No, someone else. Draw me a picture of…” she considered. “Draw me a picture of you as a child.”

That snarky grin folded into the perplexed frown of someone working intently on a problem. “I don’t really remember how I looked before the Academy.”

Hera shrugged. “Only if you want to, of course.”

Sabine still frowned, but she had the pencil between her teeth. That meant she was thinking. “I’ll work on it.”  

 

…

 

They all watched her make the kill.

Given her enthusiasm for explosions, it probably wasn’t the first time she’d killed. It wasn’t even the first time they had  _seen_  her kill. But this was definite and specific—a stormtrooper falling backwards at the wrong moment, Sabine’s blaster bolt slipping underneath the neckpiece of his armor.

He dropped without a sound and everybody paused. Kanan watched her with an expression of horror that he wasn’t very good at choking back.  _He’s not horrified by you_ , Hera thought at Sabine as hard as she could. It was that child’s body in adult armor, all hands and feet. He saw himself.  _We are not protecting this child_. That’s what he was thinking.  _What are we doing to her?_

Sabine had maintained their cover—one bolt, not much noise. They caught a whiff of burnt flesh and campfire as Zeb hauled the felled trooper out of the way and Kanan worked the door.

Sabine’s face, under the slate-colored helmet, was unreadable. Kanan and Hera exchanged looks every five seconds for the rest of the mission. That was how they decided that Kanan would go back to the ship with her if she faltered—Kanan, whom she trusted.

But she didn’t falter. She just helped Zeb watch their backs as Hera and Kanan grabbed every schematic they could off of the database. And then she went back to the ship and retreated to her room to work on…something. Some kind of art, no doubt.

Hera gave Kanan a worried look and he gave her a sigh. “I know. I’ll stop by and talk to her. But I really think it ought to be you. You’re better with people…”

“Not with her,” Hera shook her head. “She trusts you.”

“Hey, she trusts you, too!”

“She trusts me not to turn her over to the Imperials. But she LIKES you, dear.”

She heard Kanan’s rap on the door and the quiet murmur of conversation, then Sabine let him in and she returned to minding her own business in the cockpit. Kanan never came back to let her know how it went, but she supposed Sabine’s emotions were her own, at the end of the day. Nobody owed Hera a report on that.

“Here.”

Certainly she hadn’t expected an update to come from Sabine. Who was currently standing in the cockpit doorway, keeping the automatic door open, flimsi clutched nervously in her hand.

“Here. I have no idea why you’d want it, but what about this?” Sabine shoved the flimsi at her.

Hera flattened it on the console and took a look.

Pencil and watercolor, not the usual bright paint. A small girl with two long, dark ponytails. Untied ribbons. An absurdly frilly pink polka dotted skirt that stood out like a dancer’s. Dirty knees with bacta patches on them. A toy bowcaster. Cycling gloves with the fingers torn out. It had the detail of something drawn from a specific memory, maybe even from an old photograph. She could even read the designer labels on the clothing.

The Sabine of the picture bent over something, a look of cartoonish concentration on her face. Despite the detail in the picture, she’d left the entire background white.

Hera laughed, delighted. “Really? This skirt?”

Sabine played indignant, but she grinned back. “Hey, look at the rest of the outfit, okay? I was clearly a ballerina superhero.”

“Hmph. You still are.”

“So, did I deliver, or what?”

“Yeah…” Hera considered the painting. “But there’s something I wonder.”

“What’s that?”

“This picture, it’s clearly documentary. This is part of a real scene—you didn’t just reconstruct this from memory, did you?”

“No. Well, I remember the holo. Not the actual day it was taken, though.”  

Hera nodded. “Just one question, then. The background’s not filled in.” She took a breath. This was the question nobody had asked. “Who’s missing?”

Sabine’s face went ashen. Hera might as well have punched her in the stomach. She stood for a moment without breathing, considering, and in that moment Hera would have given the world to reach out and pull her into a hug.  But she knew better than to touch the girl. She could do nothing that would seem like an attack. And even sympathy was an attack right now.

“Why do I have to remember  _that_? What’s the point?”

Even the question had been an attack, of sorts. And Hera had done it deliberately. She pushed past her own guilt. This was necessary. “You don’t have to remember it. But you might find that you want to, some day.” She handed the picture back. “This little girl, she’s in an awfully empty world.”

 _Of course, you feel the loss whether you remember or not_ , Hera didn’t tell her.

Sabine sniffed back the beginnings of tears, literally sucking it up. “Well, I’m not that kid. It’s just a picture. And I don’t want to talk about that. I have a different idea.” She pulled an orange pencil from behind her ear—the other ear held a blue pencil, Hera saw. That was Sabine, always equipped. For a moment, she was afraid that the girl would draw her beskar armor right over that child. But she didn’t. She scribbled around the edges, filling in the background with a bright orange halo. It looked like a sunrise. Or a sunset. Or an explosion. Hera didn’t know how to take it.

Sabine’s stiff back, her quick hand, her frown all bespoke determination. “Look,” she said, forcing confidence. “I’ll just make a new background.”

“Yeah, you can do that,” Hera agreed. “That’s a lot better than leaving it empty.”

Sabine had shaded the picture in a circle, only the spot directly in front of her child self still blank. Her pencil scribbled furiously. Hera put her fingers over the blank spot. “Not there.”

That earned her a quizzical frown. Hera had never done anything to suggest she had the right to an opinion about art.

“If this is going to be my commission, you’ve got to leave that spot blank,” Hera explained. “You can fill in the rest of it, but there’s always a blank spot.”

The girl’s frown became thunderous. “I know what a metaphor is. I’ve been to school.”

“Smart girl. I thought you knew.”

“And it’s a little cliché, Hera.”

“What is?”

“The dumb idea that something’s always empt—” Finally her frown choked her. “—that something’s always empty,” she finished.

Hera was saved a reply. Sabine dropped her head as the end of her sentence tumbled into sobbing.

 _Baby_ , Hera didn’t say. She’d get no thanks for it tomorrow, but she couldn’t resist anymore. She gathered Sabine onto her lap on the pilot’s seat and held her like a child, while Sabine cried snot all over her shoulder and refused to look up. If the sobs didn’t rip her apart, they would be good for her. Even if they did rip her apart, it might help.

After a while, Sabine calmed down enough to sigh out, “I’m sorry.” A deep breath, almost a yawn. “I’m all right, really. This is so embarrassing. I don’t really do this. Oh, gross. I’m sorry.”

Hera shrugged, matter-of-fact. ( _Was I ever that young and pretending to be older?_  she wondered.) “Got to get it out sometime. Now seems good.” She picked up the sketch carefully between two fingers. “Do you want this, or can I keep it? Don’t tell anyone, but I love the skirt.”

Sabine laughed. “Take it. I never want to see that thing again.”

(That sketch held a place of honor in Hera’s bunk for years, just in case she changed her mind.)

“Oh—” Sabine remembered, brushing past the mortifying memory of her tears as quickly as she could. “I’ve been meaning to ask. Now seems like as good a time as any. Can I paint my room? I mean, if it  _is_  mine…”

(“Can we really keep her?” Zeb had asked. Yes, she was small, but she was resilient. And next year she’d be bigger.)

Hera sighed. “Yeah, why not?”


End file.
